The Wild Child (1970)

In 1964, François Truffaut wrote in a letter to his friend and business partner Helen Scott (who worked at the French Film Office in New York) that he had given the screenwriter Jean Gruault the assignment to prepare a script for a film about Victor of Aveyron. Victor was the famous "wild child" who had been seen in the woods in rural France around 1798/1799, living by himself in the wilderness. He was thought to be 10 or 12 years old, and in 1800 French authorities took him in and placed him in different orphanages and then finally at the national institute for the deaf and mute in Paris. (He could not speak and appeared deaf.) As he was a "wild child," and ideas about such children, and about the battle between nature and civilisation, was in fashion, as in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor became a global sensation. Newspapers wrote about him, scholars and doctors studied him, and he was discussed at the top of the French government, fresh from the turmoil of the revolution and right after Napoléon Bonaparte had taken charge of the country.

Most of what is known about Victor comes from a young physician, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who took it upon himself to try to teach Victor everything. How to read, write, speak, dress, in short, he wanted to teach Victor how to be a civilised boy instead of a wild child. Victor came to live with Itard and his housekeeper madame Guérin, and some progress was made. But Victor never progressed as far as Itard hoped, or learned how to speak, and he lived with madame Guérin until his death at 40.

That Truffaut would be interested in such a story is not surprising. The health and well-being of children was a topic that was important for him and something he frequently returned to, in his films and in his public appearances. He tried to avoid politics, but not when it came to children's rights. When he began filming The Wild Child in 1969, the idea to make it had, as shown by the letter, been with him for several years. He shot it partly at the institute in Paris where Victor had been placed (the institute is still in use today) and partly in the rural area where Victor was found, Aveyron. This gives the film a powerful sense of authenticity, like a documentary, even though it was made 170 years after the facts. The whole construction of the film adds to that feeling, as it is based on Itard's reports and the voiceover is Itard's words about the case, as if it were him who was making the film about Victor. The film consists of short scenes, each of which show a specific development in Victor's progress. There are hardly any digressions or elaborations, everything is pared down to the essentials. All music in the film is by Antonio Vivaldi, and while he was not exactly contemporary with the events of the story, Vivaldi died in 1741, it still adds to this feeling of the film being made when it was set, however impossible that is.

It is shot in black and white, almost grey, by Néstor Almendros, his first of nine collaborations with Truffaut, and it looks quite beautiful in its simplicity. They took inspiration from silent film's use of irises to emphasize one small part of the image, instead of closeups. (A recurring thing for Truffaut.) Everything about the film looks backwards rather than to the present. But it does add one distinct novelty: Truffaut himself plays Itard and this was the first time he acted.

To be able to make it as he wanted, and in black and white, Truffaut had to find American sponsors because he could not get anyone interested in the project in France. Eventually, United Artists funded the film (a man named Ilya Lopert coughed up the money and he is a character in need of his own essay), and it was produced by Truffaut's own company Les Films du Carrosse. He saw it as continuing a focus on children that he had begun, not counting the short Les mistons (1957), with The 400 Blows (1959), and he dedicated The Wild Child to Jean-Pierre Léaud, who had played the alter ego of Truffaut in The 400 Blows. This time, Truffaut felt that by playing Itard he was playing a version of André Bazin, with young Victor resembling young Truffaut, even though Truffaut did grow up with a family in Paris. But Truffaut had, as a child, been institutionalised and then taken under the wings of Bazin, rescued by him, like Itard did for Victor. (There is an interesting continuation of the living arrangements from this film to The Green Room (1978), in which the character played by Truffaut lives with a housekeeper and a boy who cannot speak.)

The Wild Child was made with a small cast and crew, with crew members, and their children, playing some parts, including his long-time close associate and creative partner Suzanne Schiffman, who also did some assistant direction when Truffaut was performing. Victor is powerfully played by Jean-Pierre Cargol, who was not an actor and would not become one either. He did however become an accomplished musician. The housekeeper, madame Guérin, was played by Françoise Seigner.

One reason nobody in France wanted to fund it was that they did not think it would be of interest to any audience. United Artists did not think so either, but they put it together with Mississippi Mermaid (1969), Truffaut's earlier film with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve, being convinced that that would be a hit, and thereby cover the expected losses on The Wild Child. The opposite happened. The Wild Child was a tremendous success in France, and around the world, and in the US too. It screened at the New York film festival, where Truffaut was treated like a star, including by the mayor John Lindsay. Truffaut would tour the world with the film, giving talks about it, about cinema and children.

***

I have seen all of Truffaut's films, most of them many times, and I like them all. Some of them are among my favourite films and have been so since I was a teenager. When I became hooked on cinema, in my mid-teens, Truffaut was one of three filmmakers that mattered the most to me, the other two being Hitchcock and David Lean. It was the beginning of a lifelong relationship between me and them, despite them not even being alive any longer. And although The Wild Child is not my absolute favourite, it remains special for me, as it was for Truffaut as well. Part of that comes from the power of the story and the images, but part of it comes from my sense of kinship with Truffaut.

Given the style and structure of the film, there is no place or space for sentimentality or depth of characterisations, yet the cumulative effect of all the short scenes of Victor's struggles becomes, at least to me, deeply moving. That it is Truffaut who plays Itard adds a layer to the film that makes it moving in a different way, and the combined effects can be quite exceptional at times. That is a level of artistic appreciation that some have been wanting to deny the existence of, or purpose of, for reasons of their own. Some because they claim to believe in "the death of the author" and others because they apparently believe that films made by corporate committees are the height of human endeavour. That to me will always be an impoverished way of looking at things in general, and art in particular.

***

Other fans of the film were the Hitchcocks. Hitchcock sent this telegram to Truffaut, or almost this telegram. He wrote it in awkward French, and this is a translation: "I saw The Wild Child which I think magnificent. Please send me the autograph of actor who plays the doctor. He is wonderful. I wish this autograph for Alma Hitchcock. Her eyes were bathed in tears. This film she says is the best of all those by Truffaut. Profound affection."

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Primary sources:

François Truffaut by David Nicholls (1993).

François Truffaut: Letters (English translation by Gilbert Adair 1990).

Truffaut: A Biography by Serge Toubiana and Antoine de Baecque (English translation by Catherine Temerson 1999).

For more information about Victor, you can listen to this BBC radio programme from 2008: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00b7lrb

Abstract and tactile

The other week I read Earning the Rockies, the latest book by Robert D. Kaplan who is an interesting thinker on geopolitics. That book is about how the geography of the United States has been the basis for its political place (or dominance) in the world. Kaplan is a deeply read scholar with impeccable credentials, and can discuss the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Romanian urbanity and 5th century Chinese warfare in the same chapter. But, and this is why I mention him here, while deeply embedded in political and historical theory he is also critical of a certain strain of academic writing/thinking for its detachment from the real world. He is the kind of writer who goes to the places he writes about, a traveller as much as a thinker.

In many different fields and disciplines there is a difference between what can roughly be called abstract theory and tactile theory. (Theory loosely defined.) It is not only in political science that this is a distinction worth making. It is equally applicable on film studies.

Within film studies I would define the tactile approach is being interested in the work itself and how it is done, being interested in the art of film and the physical object. It is also interested in the filmmakers and the audience as actual people, as individual human beings. The former, abstract theory, is by my definition interested in theory in itself, and in books about films rather than actual films. It looks at politics and ideology, and deals primarily in generalisations. It can often show an indifference to actual films, film history, filmmakers and audiences.

It is not an either/or thing, few are pure tactile or pure abstraction (Kaplan mentioned above is both as much and the star of much of contemporary cinema studies, Gilles Deleuze, could be said to be as well) and one is not automatically better than the other; it is partly a question of what you yourself are interested in. But it is not just a matter of preferences. It is a question of whether the thoughts and ideas that are presented come from research and genuine engagement with and knowledge of the material about which one writes. While I am more partial to the tactile approach myself it often happens when I read about a certain film or filmmaker that the object of study is not contextualised and therefore not properly understood and the value and uniqueness of the film or filmmaker is overestimated due to this lack of context and wider historic awareness. But abstract theory is on average worse. It can even be offensive in its lack of interest in the subject it is allegedly concerned with, i.e. film. (On occasion at conferences I have been tempted to ask "Have you actually seen a film?" after a paper has been presented, but as yet I have constrained myself.) It is a peculiar thing how it seems that many people within film studies who are researching and writing about it seem to regard film as uninteresting and even worthy of disdain. It is particularly dispiriting that many of those who give that impression, through their writing and conference papers, actually teach film studies. Imagine playing football (or soccer) and the coach is completely uninterested in the actual playing of football and instead only talks about, say, the politics of grass-cutting among Chilean peasants in "the post-political". A potentially worthy subject, but not if you are a football coach and is supposed to teach children how to play.

I have often pointed out that much of what is being taught and written about concerning film history is a collection of myths and mistakes. One strong reason for this is that so many do not bother to watch the films, even the films that they themselves write about, and this combined with the general disinterested approach to the subject means that it is rather rare for academic writing to go deeper than a random Wikipedia-entry when it comes to actual film history or practice. The book or article might be insightful and knowledgeable about whatever political theory is being discussed but not about films, either in themselves or about film history. Instead one myth or distortion after another is repeated and taught. In the rest of this post I will focus on one such area, writings about auteurs, since I have recently read several recent articles and new books in which "auteur theory" have been discussed.

Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Ernst Lubitsch

Of all these books and articles, not a single one of them gave an accurate description of it. Rather the opposite. It was not a case of simplifying for expediency but getting the basic facts backwards. Most said that "auteur theory" argued that auteurs were filmmakers who wrote their own scripts and did not make genre or mainstream films but unique and personal films. This might be how the writer in question defines an auteur now but, as I said, this is almost the opposite of what Truffaut, Godard, Sarris and others argued. What they said was that auteurs could be found anywhere, not least among mainstream genre filmmakers, and that even when they did not write their own scripts their personalities came across in their films. If you pretend to provide a history of thinking about auteurs then at least study the issue first. It is not a difficult subject, not quantum physics. Or, accept that you do not care enough to actually research it and say nothing more about it.

As an example, in Sonatas, Screams, and Silence by Alexis Luko (which I previously singled out as the most interesting of a recent bunch of Bergman books) there is one page (p. xxv) about the history of auteurism, which she claims begins with Truffaut's 1954 article A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema and that Truffaut "called for a revolution" in that article. He did not. He was praising some filmmakers whom he liked, such as Bresson, Ophuls, Tati and Becker. He then added "it so happens — by a curious coincidence — that they are auteurs who often write their own dialogue and in some cases think up the stories they direct" and he compared their films favourably to the films written by the team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost (and a few others). He was not suggesting a new kind of cinema, but was praising a certain kind of cinema that already existed. That is completely different. (Truffaut's article is one of those that are referenced by many but understood (or even read) by few.) There is no recognition in Luko's summary that this view of filmmakers far pre-dates Truffaut's article. The summary is so perfunctory it would have been better not making it at all.

In the recent edited collection The Global Auteur (eds. Jeremi Szaniawski and Seung-hoon Jeong) there is also an effort to give a summary of the history of auteurs. "As is well known, the 1950s Cahiers du cinèma critics initiated the political positioning of filmmakers' authenticity as equivalent to artists' authorship in other media." it says in the introduction (p. 2). That statement is not true. That discussion was initiated much earlier than the 1950s, it was there already in the late 1910s, in various countries and by various critics. It continued to be debated among French film critics in the 1920s, American film critics on the 1930s, British and Swedish film critics in the 1940s. There was nothing new in that respect with the Cahiers group. The Introduction later argues that "today's auteurs are philosophical thinkers who are also politically attuned observers and apt craftsmen or artists." (p. 9) which on the one hand is a bold statement from those who a few pages earlier had criticised the "semi-religious myth of independent creativity" (p. 4) and on the other hand confusing for it would suggest that earlier auteurs were not those things but if they were not then what were they and why and when did this shift from one stage to another take place?

The various chapters of The Global Auteur have their strength and weaknesses (I particularly liked William Brown's chapter about Michael Winterbottom), and for reasons known only to the editors no women are among the included auteurs, but now I want to continue focusing on the Introduction by the book's editors, partly as an example of abstract theory. The piece contains no thinking about film at all, it is only jargon and clichés, but more to the point was that there was so little connection (if any) between actual filmmakers and the theoretical constructions about them. They ask why it is relevant to talk about auteurs today and give this answer: "Because its agency is a causative force to activate an engagement that subjectively concretizes a certain universality of this global matrix of film discourse." (p. 5)

Later they argue that "Methodologically, their mapping can be not just a synchronic arrangement of various auteuristic positions, but also a diachronic narrativization of their agendas and motifs, pathologies and impasses, failures and potentials in the dialectic process of raising questions and seeking answers from the critic's perspective." (p. 7) They further say that "This yields a cognitive mapping of the political matrix that could reveal an unconscious ideology or paradigm and its cinematically virtualized reality through an aesthetic imaginary, as well as its political potential or deadlock when confronted with actual reality." (p. 9) This discussion throughout the Introduction is only interested in theoretical constructions about auteurs, and the actual filmmakers barely figures in that discussion.

***

There is nothing really new to say about filmmakers in general; it has always been, and will probably always be, the case that film is a collaborative art form but that frequently one person is the central figure, whose vision and techniques dominate the finished film, and this person is usually the director (whether or not they also have screen writing credits). This view of it has also been common among critics and others since at least the days of Lubitsch, Ince, Griffith and Chaplin. (Not about all films and all filmmakers, but about many of them, which still remains they case today.) Everything beyond that, whether you call it "auteur theory" or "auteur-structuralism" or "transnational auteurs" or "global auteurs" or "neo-auteurs" or "post-auteurs" or "third wave auteurs" or "vulgar auteurs" or whatever are theoretical games which does not change, or relate to, the actual making of the films, to what happens during pre-production, production and post-production. Filmmakers working today do not differ on average from filmmakers working in earlier eras, and there is no need for any random book about filmmakers to make an excuse for how things are different now and why we need new ways of theorising the auteur or to argue that something is more relevant than ever. (But there can be new and different ways of looking at individual filmmakers of course, from the tactile approach.)

The arguments are rarely new or different either, it is mainly just a new vocabulary. At any given time in academia, as elsewhere, there are certain fashionable words that are used, over and over again, until they lose their appeal and are exchanged for other words. You probably noticed some of them in the quotes above, such as "mapping," a current buzz word. "Re-imaging" and "re-thinking" are also popular, which usually refer to taking a perfectly good and useful term or phrase and give it a new meaning for no apparent reason. And by doing so watering it out until it becomes devoid of actual meaning, and needs to be "re-imagined" again.

***

Considering what I do professionally, I naturally spend a lot of time reading about films. It rarely gives me any pleasure though. I am much happier when reading about geopolitics and evolutionary cognition. It is a peculiar thing. All of this bothers me both on a professional level, not least with regards to the students who have to endure the teaching and the required readings of so much poor stuff, and on a personal level. I take films, and the studying of them, seriously and get offended by those within film studies who do not.

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That quote from Truffaut above is slightly misleading. It is a fairly recent translation (I do not know the exact year) but made long after "auteur theory" became a thing. Obviously when Truffaut wrote it "auteur theory" was not a thing. The original text says "ce sont pourtant des cinéastes français et il se trouve - curieuse coïncidence - que ce sont des auteurs qui écrivent souvent leur dialogue et quelques-uns inventent eux-mêmes les histoires qu'ils mettent en scène" and nobody at the time would keep the word "auteurs" as it stands but translate it to "writers" most likely, or possibly "authors". So reading that translation gives the impression that Truffaut is coining a term, when he is actually only saying that some of these directors were also writers. This is a larger issue, which I might explore on a later date.

The French New Wave

Many years ago I attended a course in film history. One week the topic was Italian neorealism and the lecturer said that what was new and exciting about neorealism was that instead of filming in studios and using film stars they shot on the streets, in actual locations, and with unknowns. The next week the topic was French New Wave and the (same) lecturer said that what was new and exciting about the French New Wave was that instead of filming in studios and using film stars they shot on the streets, in actual locations, and with unknowns. It is one thing to mistakenly claim that neorealism was all about location shooting and using amateurs, but saying that what was new with the French New Wave was exactly the same thing that the week before was new with neorealism should have given even that lecturer pause. But no, and the students diligently wrote down what was being said, whereas I shook my head in disbelief.

It is often said that critics and scholars who work on auteurs are being romantic, propagating the myth of the artist as a lone genius even though that is not how most auteur scholars look at filmmakers. But it has many times struck me that those who write about, and eulogise, new waves, of which there were quite a few in the 1960s and 1970s, are often the most romantic of scholars, combining a love of radical Marxist politics with an admiration of angry young men. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's book Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s from 2007 is a good example of this romanticism. It is the kind of book that has extravagant sentences like "The cinema of the 1950s had been on the whole apolitical." which is not true at all. It is not even clear what it means. There are also bold statements like "The first person to blend realism and fantasy in a convincing way was Roman Polanski.", which is a meaningless statement when there is no explanation as to why, to mention a few, Luis Buñuel or Michael Powell or Henry Hathaway's Peter Ibbetson (1935) or William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie (1948) are disqualified. It also has a chapter called "Technological Innovations: Colour, Wide Screen, the Zoom Lens", as if colour and wide screen were invented in the 60s.

Portrait of Jennie

There are many new waves, often vaguely defined, but the most famous is of course the French New Wave. Yet even it is hard to define. Even to say when it began is hard. The most conventional starting point is François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), which is fine if the definition of a New Wave-film is a film by Truffaut or Jean-Luc Godard. But if the definition is a film by a first-time filmmaker who was formerly a critic as Cahiers du Cinéma, which is a common definition, it then at least follows that Claude Chabrol's Le beau Serge and Les cousins (both from 1958), must be counted. That is the starting point for David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson in Film History: An Introduction.

But if the French New Wave is to be defined not by the background of the filmmakers but from the style and vision of the actual films, then it would seem that Louis Malle's Lift to the Scaffold (1957) deserves to be included, and his follow-up The Lovers (1958), both with Jeanne Moreau. Why should Malle be disqualified only because he was not a writer at Cahiers du Cinéma when his films, visually, temporally, thematically, aurally, and actor-wise, are just as much New Wave as Chabrol, Truffaut or Godard? Sometimes it feels like snobbery and nothing else, which is not a valid criterion when doing film history. Peter Cowie, in Revolution! The Explosion if World Cinema (2004), a title which clearly signals the romanticism, wholeheartedly embraces Malle whereas Nowell-Smith does not include Malle (he calls him "uninterpretable and contradictory"). Bordwell and Thompson do not include Malle either, and call him "commercial", although it is not clear that he is more commercial than, for example, Chabrol. Bordwell and Thompson do on the other hand include Georges Franju as a New Wave director (as part of the so-called "Left Bank"-group of the New Wave, which also includes Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda), but there they might be in a minority. In A History of the French New Wave (2002), Richard Neupert wrestles, on several pages, with whether Malle is New Wave or not. But Franju is never mentioned by him at all. Naomi Greene in The French New Wave: A New Look (2007) regards Malle as separate from the New Wave but important, and she puts him together with Jacques Demy. Most however like to include Agnès Varda and her film Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), but that was not her first film, she made her first feature in 1955, La pointe courte, and consequently it is sometimes called the first New Wave film. The same year, 1955, Alexandre Astruc made Bad Liaisons, which some want to claim as part of the New Wave too. An interesting case is Roger Vadim. His first film And God Created Woman... (1956), in alluring widescreen and colour, with Brigitte Bardot and Jean-Louis Trintignant, has the youthfulness, rebelliousness and movement of Truffaut, albeit with less depth, and as it was very successful it made it easier for the later New Wave directors to get funding, Vadim's later film Les liaisons dangereuses (1959), with Trintignant, Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe could easily be counted as New Wave, where it not for its director.

Jeanne Moreau in The Lovers

Those mentioned so far have all been full-length feature films. If short films are to be included, and why not, 1956 is also an important year. To quote from Jean Douchet's book French New Wave (1998):

We can date the birth of the New Wave itself to 1956, the year when Coup du berger, a short by Jacques Rivette, produced by Pierre Braunberger, was filmed. The role played by Films de la Pléiade - de small production studio run by Braunberger, a former producer of Renoir, Buñuel, Clair, and others - was central to the renewal of French cinema.

Le coup du berger (available here) is 28 minutes long and Rivette made it together with Chabrol and Jean-Marie Straub. Worth to add though is that Truffaut made his first short, Une visite, a year earlier, in 1955, working together with Resnais and Rivette.

So it is a debatable point when it specifically began, and an unnecessary one. French New Wave was part of a general movement within French culture and the term itself was coined 1957, at the newspaper L'Express, so it prefigures Godard's and Truffaut's first feature films and was originally not even about films at all. It is much larger than that. Suffice to say that the French New Wave was a general change in the cultural atmosphere in France when those who were children during the war, or were born during the war, came of age. Film was part of that, and there was no decisive moment or specific film when it all began, it was a long process that snowballed. One important thing though, which can be specified in time, was 1959 when the Minister of Culture, under André Malraux, changed the funding situation for films and decided to give money to first-time directors. What happened next was the shock when over 100 new filmmakers got to make their first features during a few years. That was the explosion that put the term French New Wave on everybody's lips. More specific than that we need not be. The French New Wave should not be slimmed down to be about certain themes or a certain style (the films vary considerably), and it is not about a handful of famous directors or any particular journal. Better to say that the French New Wave was the sum total of the hundreds of new filmmakers who made their first films during a handful of years, and everybody is included, from Vadim to Rivette.

So while the beginnings of the French New Wave are vague, it is also the case that what proceeded it has often been unfairly dismissed, as suggested by Nowell-Smith's claim that the 1950s was "apolitical" when it was not, or by Peter Cowie ridiculing the hypocrisy of 1950s Hollywood. I am not convinced that the 50s were more hypocritical than any other decade, and in Italy, Japan and the US, the 1950s was an exceptional decade in terms of the quality and daring of the films made. But even French cinema was frequently impressive. It was after all the decade that had new films by Jean-Pierre Melville, Max Ophüls, Jacques Becker, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati, René Clément, Henri-Georges Clouzet, as well as others. The last two are among those dismissed by Truffaut but why should we trust him? Truffaut's article "A Certain Tendency in French Cinema" (1954) is often mentioned, where the scriptwriting duo of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost is seen as an example of all that was wrong with French cinema prior to 1959. But what exactly are their flaws, as far as Truffaut is concerned? It is two things. First that the adaptations they have made are not faithful to the books they have adapted and that they are against religion and the bourgeoisie. But if those are the flaws of Aurenche and Bost, they have done nothing wrong, It might even be said that they are true to the later spirit of the New Wave. So that side of Truffaut's argument is not particularly strong. But Truffaut had another concern too, that Aurenche and Bost were too literary, that they did not think in images and movements but in words, and perhaps even looked down upon cinema. Truffaut then suggested what to him was the opposite of that:

I mean Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophuls, Jacques Tati and Roger Leenhardt; these are French cinéastes, and it so happens — curious coincidence — that they are auteurs who often write their dialogue and some of them themselves invent the stories they direct.

But it is not obvious that a film like Devil in the Flesh (1947), directed by Claude Autant-Lara and written by Aurenche and Bost, is less cinematic than a film by Bresson or Becker. This is not to compare the quality of the films, just to point out that Truffaut might not have an obvious case. Neither was it the case that the critics at Cahiers du Cinéma were in agreement. Truffaut liked Becker, but Rivette hated him. Both Truffaut and Rivette disliked Clément but Pierre Kast thought Clément was the best French director working in the 1950s. These are debatable points, but what is important is that French cinema prior to the French New Wave was rich, varied, interesting and filled with greatness. The best French films made in the 1950s by, for example, Melville, Becker, Bresson and Ophüls, are equal to the best films made during the 1960s, at the height of the Wave. There is no reason to diminish what came before just to emphasis the New Wave, however you define it, because the New Wave can take care of itself.

Godard's Contempt - Le Mépris (1963)

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Truffaut's article can be found in Movies and Methods: Vol. 1 (edited by Bill Nichols, 1976), among other places.

Reading Bazin (#4)

For some reason many film historians have settled on Francois Truffaut's 1954 article "A Certain Tendency in French Cinema" as the birthplace of the idea that the director is (or should be) considered the author and artist behind a film. But as I have written earlier, that idea is much older than Truffaut's article and has been around since at least the 1910s. If the focus is on criticism in post-war France there is also an earlier and better article to start with than Truffaut's piece; a report that André Bazin wrote  in 1946 from the film festival in Cannes, which was published in Le courrier du l'etudiant October 30 - November 13, 1946. This, the fourth post in the series "Reading Bazin", is about that report. The translation is by Stanley Hochmann, and published in the collection French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance - The Birth of a Critical Esthetic (1981). Links to previous instalments in "Reading Bazin" are at the bottom of the post.

Bazin begins by expressing his disappointment with the festival because he felt there were more good films to be seen at the cinemas in Paris than at the festival, especially films from the US. The Westerner (William Wyler 1940), Citizen Kane (Orson Welles 1941), The Little Foxes (William Wyler 1941), How Green Was My Valley (John Ford 1941), Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944) and The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang 1944) are the films he mentions that are shown in Paris. The only American film in Cannes Bazin feels is equal to those is The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder 1945). It is worth pointing out that it was exactly this wave of extraordinary American films coming to France all at once, when the Second World War was over, that had such an immense influence on the next generation of French filmmakers and film critics, such as Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol. It was also these films that led some French critics to use the term film noir to describe these, for them, new films. (Film noir meant something slightly different then than now).

There were good films from other parts of the world though and Bazin mentions some French, Italian, Russian and British films such as La bataille du rail (René Clément 1946), Open City (Roberto Rossellini 1945) and Brief Encounter (David Lean 1945). But on the whole he claims it was a "barren year" because there was no "Wyler, nor Capra, nor John Ford, nor Preston Sturges, nor Carné, nor Renoir, nor Eisenstein." But the beauty of Cannes for Bazin is not so much the quality of the films but the diversity of them. The festival is almost the only chance to see so many films from so many countries at once, and be able to compare them. He notes that the theme of many films that year is resistance, and that the foreign films "are all dramas, practically documentaries". He thinks the foreign films are braver, more honest in their depiction of violence and torture, than the French films, and he wonders if the scenes of war and destruction, and images from the concentrations camps, "would have been possible in literature without falling into turgidity and sadism. And yet how much stronger the cinematic image is. But cinema is the art of reality." An idea that is central in much of Bazin's writings. He then differentiates the European films' depiction of death with the American films, and finds the Americans wanting. With the exception of The Lost Weekend Bazin finds them less urgent, less real. "The world in which the characters struggle is separated from us by a glass that their blood does not penetrate." And he blames this on "the disastrous influence of the Hays-Johnson office" which "prevents a subject from ever being treated in depth and in all its consequences." He also blames a kind of self-censorship on behalf of too many filmmakers, for commercial reasons. But there is one thing about Hollywood cinema that almost makes up of for this. It is that Hollywood cinema "seems to have finally achieved the degree of perfection which frees the artist from technical concerns." This has given the director the ability to think "in cinema with a variety and precision of syntax and vocabulary that are equal to that of writing. As a result we see a multiplication of the names of directors whose presence in the credits signifies something."

In Bazin's view, if previously there were five or six American filmmakers of distinction, now there are at least 20 that are important and whose styles are "certainly as different as those of a half dozen novels by strong personalities". Of those filmmakers he mentions Welles, Sturges, Wilder, Hitchcock, Preminger, Ford, Capra, Wyler and "even a Robert Siodmak or a George Stevens, who seemed to be devoted to mass production." Bazin also says that "we are forced to the conclusion that cinema is in the sociological and esthetic situation of producing for the screen the equivalent of books" and that Hollywood "is able to furnish the exact cinematic equivalent of a paragraph by Faulkner, by Hemingway, by Caldwell."

Then he ends by again complaining about the Hays code and the censorship which keeps the American films from being as bold and frank as its literature, saying that only Welles, Wyler, Sturges and Clifford Odets* are able to combine style and theme to reach cinema's full potential.

Many of the key themes in Bazin's writing appear in this article. Thoughts about cinema and death, cinema's relationship with reality, the importance of style (he writes that it is "wrong to believe that it is the scenario that distinguishes escapist cinema from realist cinema", instead he thinks it is the style of the film that matter), and the centrality of the director. And the filmmakers that will continue to be his favourites are highlighted here such as Renoir, Welles, Wyler and Sturges. Bazin's argument that the director can be regarded as a writer, with a style that is uniquely his, and that enables the filmmaker to rise above the material is exactly what the critics at Cahiers du cinéma later in the 1950s, and then Andrew Sarris in the US, would argue. So it is a rich and interesting text and could be regarded as a valuable contribution to an understanding of how Bazin and the future French film critics thought about cinema. It would not be out of place on a list of mandatory readings for film students.

Reading Bazin (#1) is here.
Reading Bazin (#2) is here.
Reading Bazin (#3) is here.
Reading Bazin (#5) is here.
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*Odets had actually directed only one film, None But the Lonely Heart (1944) and would direct one more in 1959, The Story on Page One. But Odets was primarily a writer.

François Truffaut

I have loved the films of Truffaut since I was very young and I hope I will still love them when I am very old. Truffaut is also one of those filmmakers where I am not content with just the films. I need more. I think I have more books about, or by, Truffaut than any other filmmaker. His is a cinema of people who love too much, and Truffaut himself might have been a man who loved cinema too much. If such a thing is possible. It would have been his 80th birthday today, had he still been alive, so I will celebrate him with some clips. Now watch, and listen to the music of Georges Delerue. Le cinema règne.

Theory canon

In About a Boy, Will (in the film played by Hugh Grant) had the good fortune of having a father who wrote a popular Christmas song, and Will has been able to live well ever since on the royalties of that song.

Sometimes in the world of film theory, there's occasionally something similar going on. Laura Mulvey wrote the essay Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, Tom Gunning wrote the essay The Cinema of Attractions, Roland Barthes wrote (admittedly not in film theory, but it's still used there) The Death of the Author. And they're forever deeply connected with these essays, despite having written a lot of other things. These three examples are just a small sample. One thing about this is that what they wrote in those essays is not necessarily something that they later felt was really accurate, or something they had really thought through. I'm not saying that Tom Gunning is wishing his essay was removed from the market, he might still swear by it, but it's only reasonable that as you progress and expand as a scholar, you get new ideas and new impressions, and perhaps even feel that the essay you once wrote is today somewhat embarrassing.

Another such essay is François Truffaut's A Certain Tendency in French Cinema. Truffaut wrote it when he was 22 years old, and needed to make a name of himself, so he tried to be as provocative as possible, and not really writing what he actually believed, but rather what would get people's attention. And attention it got. And still gets. And it's basically just a young guy harassing two older scriptwriters, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, blaming them for what ills French cinema, and for making French cinema vulgar. Yet two years later Truffaut wrote a review saying that Aurenche and Bost were indispensable.

But still all the world's film students have to read these essays. There's a well established canon of film theoretical texts, even among scholars and departments that deplores the very idea of a film canon. There's something contradictory here.

And these texts are not only read, indiscriminately, but they are also quoted and references ad nauseum. Probably since they and their fellow canonical texts are the only texts people have read to any large extent, so not only do they know it themselves, but they also know that everyone else will know about it, so it's a safe thing to quote. I recently read an anthology about cinema and nation but when the fifth essay used the phrase "as Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities" in the first paragraph I throw away the book in desperation. I've got nothing particular against Benedict Anderson but surely there's been something else written somewhere, at some point, on the subject. That book (Imagined Communities) is 27 years old, has nothing happens since then?

Robert Ray at University of Florida once wrote, in 1988 to be precise, that since everybody in film studies, from graduate level and onwards, are pushed to publish as much as possible "the inevitable happens: a catchy malleable idea like Lacan's 'mirror stage' suddenly crops up as the basis for hundreds of articles and conference papers, only to be replaced by a new fad, the race/class/gender template". (Reprinted in "How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies") When I studied Film History and Theory at Stockholm University in the 1990s I made a solemn promise not to quote Foucault in anything I wrote, since that was the only person everybody were quoting, or so it seemed at the time. Now I've mellowed a bit, and he is actually quoted in my thesis. But very briefly.

So what is the problem then? Well, it is that the study of film theory so often is monolithic and canonical, that many theoretical texts are read and re-read even though they either are well past their sell-by-date, or were bonkers to begin with, and that it so often happens that those that read the theoretical texts, be they essays or books, somehow becomes absorbed in this or that theory, and treat it as gospel. Whenever I happen to meet such a person I'm reminded of what John Maynard Keynes said after a meeting with some other economists: "I believe I was the only one in that room who wasn't a Keynesian."

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A lot of the theoretical stuff also happens to be written by either French Marxists or by writers very much inspired by French Marxists, and occasionally psychoanalysis (i.e. Jacques Lacan). That is another conundrum (or spectre) which we can discuss some other time.